ENGLISH-ONLY POLICY: CULTURE, IDENTITY AND ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

Restricting using non-English languages in education dates back to the colonial period in the 1830s and during the great wave of European immigrations roughly from 1880 to1920. Through the history of American, non-English languages were devalued, conquered, marginalized or assimilated. In parallel with what has manifest in the past, immigrants from Mexico, Russia and China are targeted as threats to cultural unity as immigrants from German, Polish, and Italian immigrants before. The purpose of this is to discuss this phenomenon, namely English-only policy regarding culture, identity and academic achievement. To do so, the paper has been divided into two main sections: the first section gives a general historical background about English-only movement, its effects on educating minority children in the new millennium, and the false linguistic and cognitive beliefs on which it is based; the second section presents practical issues based on cognitive, cultural, literacy and critical pedagogical theories.